Home Affairs 'closes the tap'

2007-11-13 19:02

Cape Town - Late registration of births will soon be significantly tightened to prevent illegals obtaining SA ID documents and thus government grants, Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said on Tuesday.

The late registration of births was one of the biggest loopholes identified in the department, she told the National Assembly's home affairs committee.

It had been used by "undesirable elements" to lay their hands on birth certificates and ultimately IDs.

She had directed the department's management to "close this tap" and the implementation plan was almost complete, Mapisa-Nqakula said.

But in closing that loophole, the department had to develop a plan for proper screening measures to ensure that genuine South Africans could still access the service.

"[To] ensure that people who come for late registration [of births] are indeed true South Africans, they are born in SA," she said.

Illegal immigrants acquired fraudulent IDs mainly through this method.

'Simply register late'

"You simply register late, you get affidavits from one or two people who will claim they know you - even if they don't know you, and then you secure a registration of late birth.

"This has created very serious problems for us, so we're closing it.

"The truth of the matter is this thing has been going on for a long time... it did not start in 2005 [or] in 1994," she said.

In many instances, where illegal migrants had been arrested, they had been in possession of a SA birth certificate.

"And all we want to know is how do they acquire these birth certificates.

"And it was very clear to us that it is through this late registration process we allowed."

'It was a good idea'

It was a good idea, at the time the decision was made, to allow late registration of births, but "perhaps now it is working against us".

"I attended functions, imbizos, where as you are addressing the imbizo, you have an Induna, or a teacher, or a priest, who is sitting somewhere - because there are mobile [home affairs] units - producing affidavits and selling them to the public at R50 each in order for them to go for late registration of birth."

Regarding the decision to go ahead with plans to introduce a smart-card ID, Mapisa-Nqakula said this was prompted by the fact that the once considered safe green bar-coded ID was now being fraudulently produced by skilled forgers.

This allowed many non-SA citizens to acquire government grants and other benefits, impacting on the whole of government's service delivery.

"Green bar-coded IDs were perhaps good at the time, but we have a number of people with green bar-coded IDs who never should have had them," Mapisa-Nqakula said.

- SAPA